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Stephen Wolfram Aims to Democratize His Software

By Steve Lohr December 14, 2015 9:00 amDecember 14, 2015 9:00 am

For nearly three decades, Stephen Wolfram has built software technology that has attracted an avid following among mathematicians and scientists. His Mathematica program for symbolic mathematical computation and its programming language, Wolfram Language, are favorites of the intelligentsia of the quant world in universities and corporations.

Wolfram Alpha, his question-answer technology, is available on its own website and serves up many of the answers for Apple’s voice-controlled digital assistant, Siri. His approach to this artificial-intelligence challenge was both innovative and idiosyncratic, and characteristic of Mr. Wolfram, who earned his Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology when he was 20 and soon after received a MacArthur “genius” award. Wolfram Alpha, he explains, is a “knowledge-based system,” which computes answers from its storehouse of knowledge rather than today’s prevailing technique of determining statistical probabilities from poring through vast amounts of data.

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Stephen Wolfram said Wolfram Language is meant to be a programming tool that is both powerful and accessible.Credit

His Wolfram Language is similarly a tool for what he calls “knowledge-based programming.” And Mr. Wolfram wants to make his technology and his software philosophy available to far more people, including newcomers to computing, like students and children. So he has decided to make a version of the Wolfram Language and development tools available as a free cloud service. To help, he also has published a book, “An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language,” which is free to read online and can be ordered in a print version from the Wolfram website ($14.96) or Amazon ($16.70).

In an interview, Mr. Wolfram described the moves as steps toward the realization of his original vision for his company, Wolfram Research, which he founded in 1987. “My big goal is make what can be done with computation as broadly accessible as possible,” he said.

“You want the human to have to specify as little as possible, by putting as much intelligence into the language as possible,” he said.

With his free offering in the cloud, Mr. Wolfram hopes that one day “random kids can build things that only people with the fanciest tools could in the past.”

That may not be as much of a stretch as it seems. Wolfram Language is already one of the programming languages distributed with the Raspberry Pi, a credit card-size computer that can be plugged into a computer monitor or television and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. The most popular model is $35. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a British charity founded in 2009 to further basic education in computing to young people of all income levels. Its nonprofit company, Raspberry Pi Trading, sells the inexpensive, general-purpose computers.

Eben Upton, the chief executive of Raspberry Pi trading company, is a technical director of Broadcom, a designer of wireless and broadband computer chips, and the former head of computer studies at St. John’s College, Cambridge University. For scientists, the automation in Wolfram Language allows them to focus on the scientific problems they want to explore and solve. “You don’t have to do a lot of boilerplate programming,” Mr. Upton said. “For pros, that kind of repetitive programming is an annoyance. In teaching, it’s a killer. Kids get bored and wander off.”

For beginners, the Wolfram Language, Mr. Upton said, makes it possible to write five or six lines of code and on the screen appears, say, a 3-D rendering of an apple or a Batman logo. “It’s these little gems,” he said, “and the kids say, ‘Wow, that’s really cool,’ and it gets them started.”

In the last three and a half years, Raspberry Pi, Mr. Upton said, has sold about seven million of its stripped-down computers, which run on the Linux operating system. Since they are available to anyone, millions of them have been sold to companies that use them for industrial controllers on machinery and to adult hobbyists. But about two million, Mr. Upton estimates, are used by pre-college students and children. Wolfram Language is one of five programming languages distributed with the Raspberry Pi, along with Python, Scratch, C++ and Java.

Making the Wolfram Language and development tools widely available as a free cloud service, Mr. Upton said, is a further charitable step. “This isn’t about Wolfram selling its products,” he said.

Yet by widening the audience for its technology, Wolfram Research stands to benefit in the long run as more and more users eventually opt for its subscription-based, premium versions of the software. In that sense, Wolfram is in step with moves recently by major technology companies to open up programming tools, making them free and often open-source software, all to attract more developers. Apple has made its Swift programming tools open source, Google opened up its TensorFlow machine-learning software, and IBM did the same with its SystemML.

Wolfram Language has become a preferred tool of some start-ups, like Emerald Therapeutics. The San Francisco biotech company is developing its own antiviral therapies as well as offering a service, Emerald Cloud Laboratory, which allows outside scientists to use it from anywhere in the world. Brian Frezza, co-founder of Emerald Therapeutics, calls Wolfram Language “a perfect fit for the science we’re doing” and said Mr. Wolfram’s design choices reflect a “technological auteur” at work, giving his software a “fanatical user devotion that you find in things like Apple products.”

But how wide an audience Wolfram Language can reach is uncertain, given the vast user base and familiarity of more popular languages. “It’s very rich and exceptionally powerful,” said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “But most people I know prefer to use standard programming languages like Java.”